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Helmut Lang’s Cave-Art Project

Art & Design

Forget Manhattan: The ‘big shows’ are in the Hamptons, come summer.

This past Saturday evening, the art elite hit the upscale sticks to turn out for fashion designer Helmut Lang’s multi-media exhibition’s opening of “Make It Hard,” running through August 8 at East Hampton’s rural-esque The Fireplace Projectspace-house.

We cannot do it justice in words, as we are not art critics (although we own a pair of his designer underpants!), so we’ll let the esteemed arts scribe and galloping curator, the one and only, shabby-chic, atypically-Brit, Porsche-driving, lady-loving Neville Wakefield, explain what was before our eyes:

“The columnular forms that rise from floor to ceiling invoke forces of nature and culture. They suggest both the accretive geological slowness of stalactites, and the destructive force of tornadoes. And if their material has been subjected to similar violence here it takes on the graceful abstract form of the endless columns; odes perhaps to Brancusi’s sculptural connection between terrestrial form and spiritual grace, life, and afterlife.”

Perhaps!

Mr. Wakefield astutely continues: “Lang’s ambiguous forms are made not of stone or bronze, but of the objects and things he created during his twenty odd years as a fashion designer. The archive that stood testament to his immense achievement within that field–he had shredded. The materials and fabrics he used to give temporary definition to the body are now just traces of natural and synthetic fibers, plastics, metals, leathers, fur, skins, feathers and hair –erasing the past and the difference they once stood for. Thus metabolized, the material began to take the form of strangely beautiful excretions: witnesses to both the transience of our creative endeavors, and the enduring need out of which such efforts are born.”

Excretions, he says! Neat!

It’s worth checking out if you are out in “the country,” as Hamptonites call it here. Truly crazy-sane stuff.